Every first hand account of a tremendous fire, be it the fire bombing of a town or a massive wildfire, mentions the tremendous winds.

I was just reading an account of one of the German firebombings the other day and one if the things it mentioned was that the winds were too strong for children and the elderly to flee. Not a vortex but it's an aspect if fire that we don't think about.

Thermobaric weaponry works by making all the air go somewhere else in a goddamn hurry. It's really tricky to accomplish in a controlled, tactical fashion but nature does a helluva job of spreading it wide.

I think this was mostly good old fashioned incendiary bombs, nothing fancy. It was during ftom the bombing of Cologne in World War II, when this kind of thing was still pretty new. It was one of the first truely massive bomber raids of the war, almost 1000 bombera in the first pass

Yeah yeah totally I get that. what I'm saying is that the air pressure/wind force from high-scale conflagration is a weapon in its own right substantial enough that the US Air Force spent billions developing it.

I honestly also think it was pretty cool based on the limited footage of it I've seen. I wonder if we missed out on smart bombs by like 50 years and if pigeons are smarter than modern guidance technology